Notices

http://www.democracynow.org/podcast.xml

http://kuow.org/rss.php?program=weekday&display=10

(Presuming those make sense as responses to your questions; they're my only podcasts and it's been several weeks since I set them up.)

It happens with both my podcast subscriptions, so I doubt that it is related to a specific feed. But since you say this is unusual, wait before trying to replicate. Today it hasn't done it, so I'll see tomorrow if today's downloads are accessible from within Canola. And if there is still a problem, I'll bring it up again.

Marcelo, you want to see some really unexpected behavior? For this feed, all Thursdays appear like in this screenshot!

hi,
I created a empty folder
/media/mmc2 # mkdir floppy
#mount /dev/sda1 /media/mmc2/floppy
canola;

the mp3's there play perfectly on the default media player & MediaBox.

yup; canola recognized them and displayed them in all the lists (all music; albums; album covers...)
when I select any track, canola says it's loading it, then stops playing it, and removes the indicator from the progress bar.

there IS a way of doing it differently; otherwise I wouldn't have mentioned MediaBox: that program just asks you which folders you want to play, and gives you a display similar to the default file manager. There, I selected internal media card, external card and "removable storage device/music" (/music is a folder I created on the USB)

without any mounting, it works perfectly. with mounting elsewhere than /media/usb, it does not work.

specs: n800, OS2008, jolouis's USB b to female adapter, 4gb SanDisk cruzer micro USB drive

maybe add a similar media select to Canola as in MediaBox (take a look- neat interface, kinetic scrolling, finger-friendly (with a few weak spots), USB support!. lacks shuffle/repeat though). If I'm not mistaking it's opensource.
http://mediabox.garage.maemo.org/

Ilia

P.S. can someone remind me of the syntaxis for hyperlinks in html?

Ilia,

We know mediabox, there must be some problem related to our dbus message to the default media player to play the file (mediabox uses mplayer) and thus we will find and kill the bug.

We can go into some of the points you've said but I don't think is important for that matter.

We got your problem, we are investigating but we do have our goals, and We will not make like mediabox. At all. This difference is the nice thing about maemo / open platforms. Media box fits for a lot of users, we fit to others, Ukmp fits to others... I respect pycage for it's effort and for conducting (almost?) solely this project, but we have different goals. like himself says "Canola is not a media center" and I never say anything back. (Maybe he never used frontrow, but I really don't care) and also I am (truly) proud of not only MB, but also UKMP and kagu because we did a lot of work to push python forward, we did a lot of work to optmize even the pygame he uses to draw stuff and in our minds this work was a success helped also by those really neat python applications, by those brave solo developers.

What we can say is : you still have options, and we always refund the non-satisfied customers ))

Just to make clear : WHEN YOU PLUG A USB THING : IT MOUNTS if it doesn't, you need to mount manually. it's a basic unix principle. The only thing we need to see is what is happening when you hit play (the message is sent to the default media player engine) and it's not being interpreted.

So please: can you remember that everysingle software has bugs, has features lacking, and if they are in beta, they are evolving. For the love of god, people seems to "demand" that everything they need should be working, in the way THEY think is good, and in the timeframe they think is reasonable. Any applications (be it canola, mediabox or wordpy or mapper) is a result of long coding hours, debugging hours and while I'm incredible patient I also have limits to what I consider to be a little bit too much of demands from some users.

This will be fixed? Yes. This should work in the easiest way possible (in safe conditions) ? Probably.

Sorry if this sounds rude, but please bare in mind that things takes time.

Marcelo

Gerald : this is even stranger! This used to happen in beta2 and 3 I believe, quite strange that is back again.

This is already into investigation, and I also want to know what is causing this : // these parsing problems should not happen any more, or at least give a meaningful error message could help.

Also: we are including an about section in the settings to hold some information that will be valuable to reporting problems!

Thanks for the effort in reproducing the error for us!

Marcelo

sorry for that.

could you mention how you got an ipod to work on canola? I could work around from that...

I liked Canola for it's relatively lightweight player capacities (audio & youtube); lightweight compared to most other players (exception: youamp). I tried something that I would believe to be a feature (playback from USB). If it does not work or is not supported (yet), just say this directly.
Since Canola isn't open-source, I cannot modify it myself to my liking. This is why I try to report you the bugs that I find - to make this player better.

now, I get the following:
while usb drive is mounted on /media/usb, canola loads as usual
as soon as I mount it on /media/mmc2/floppy, Canola stopped loading.

i'll try to find dbus libraries and reinstall them...

Ilia

P.S. just found out something even more peculiar: while usb is mounted on /media/mmc2/floppy, I cannot launch canola from X terminal (result described above), but I CAN launch it from the applications menu.
when launched, canola sees all the media that is on the USB.
Launched a file from USB: no cursor to indicate position, timer going on left, audio playing!

edit 2: nope: disappearance of position & total time is only true for the first track. as soon as I clicked on the next track, everything went back to normal. only problem remaining: why doesn't canola work from command line, but does from applications?

Hi Ilia,

MorpheuZ is here to help you on that, he's responsible for the whole player part, and thus he can help you.

About the USB we were aware, but when I told you that we did, was really "accidental" because we didn't have any official support still. Maybe MorpheuZ didn't told me if it was canola running on maemo or canola running on Mamona (it could be different). But anyways, we will indeed find out why this is behaving like that.

The natural behavior we see is : if there's a new pluglable device we can ask if you want to scan that device for media...and do the scan right away and then you have access to it.

So let's see how can we solve this issue : / if we find out anything that is helpful you for sure will be the first one to know

Cheers,

Marcelo

Thank you!

right now it's working quite acceptably (although I need to keep in mind that I cannot touch my flash card - don't want to know the consequences). the only noticeable downside to my way of running it right now is the complete lack of cyrillic support (sceenshot a few post before). Not a great loss since it's music that I'm listening to - not reading the author's names...

as for the dbus problems, I might have a clue: in order to get mouse support, I installed the following :
the second one is a mouse polling soft (displays onscreen mouse when USB mouse is plugged in).
the first one, however, might be interfering with canola. will remove it tomorrow and see the results. Will inform you asap. (although why would canola work directly and not through xterm is beyond me)

One thing I noticed that I don't remember happening with beta 7, but when playing WMAs the audio is choppy if I move through the UI while a song is playing. The choppiness stops as soon as I stop touching the UI. Does not happen with MP3s. Note that I'm using the .26 version of MPlayer. I'm not sure, but I "think" I was using the built-in N800 player with beta 7.

Spice3d : Can you make a simple test? Run the same file on the default media player and try to see if the cpu goes higher? Why : if this is happening is because the cpu is jumping, then if playing (media engine) is consuming cpu there's no cpu for Canola to animate screens.

Mp3s are by far the best optimized on the device (IMHO) and this is why it doesn't make the canola choppy : /

Let me know how the same files are playing on the regular media player.

Marcelo